I’d been battling constant fatigue, energy swings, inability to focus for long periods of time, or sometimes at all—as though there was a thin, cloudy film around my brain—for too long. A month ago, I decided to go grain and sugar-free, and it worked.

I’ve learned to do the most important things in the morning: write, sweat, journal, meditate because it’s when I’m most clean and clear and sharp, by far. If I wait, the chances of those things happening falls drastically. And if those things don’t happen, my mind and life fall off track astonishingly fast. It’s practical. And practical every day equals profound. This is how you make your bones.

The phenomenon has revealed itself over time. In the beginning, traveling was nail-bitingly stressful and not fun at all. It took time for me to appreciate the concept of traveling without imbibing, to rewrite all those tracks in my brain that said the only way traveling would be a full experience was if I was drinking my way through it. For a while—like a couple years—I equated new places with the uprush of intoxication. It felt sad, boring, and incomplete to even imagine a vacation unpunctuated with cocktails, let alone actually do it.

I don’t like what’s happening with women online right now, particularly in recovery, spiritual, and so-called feminist circles. It appears there is a growing contingent of people who I would assert even six months ago had no awareness of the word privilege, and now feel compelled to call out other women on theirs at every turn.

I’ve become fairly obsessed with sleep in recent years. Since getting sober, sleep has become a true spiritual practice for me. It’s a daily, practical practice that I take as sacred and imperative to my sanity. It is probably my number one self-care practice and a total non-negotiable. With that, I bring you seven things that have brought me better sleep.

Today I am four years sober. I don’t know much, but I know this: you must let the space exist between where you are and where you want to be. You must do everything you can to stay in that space until a new life fills in.

There are few things I love more than a book list, so here’s one that’s near and dear to my heart. A mix of memoirs, self-help, and psychological/scientific study, these are my favorite books about addiction and sobriety.